


An Act of Rebellion

by MalcolmInSpace



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:00:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6630532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmInSpace/pseuds/MalcolmInSpace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lobot undertakes a dangerous mission on behalf of the rebellion and is reminded of why he fights the Empire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Act of Rebellion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melody_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Jade/gifts).



The Imperials didn’t even seem to see him. This was nothing new to Lobot, of course. Most people saw the cogitator ‘plants and their eyes just slid off, like he was a houseplant, but the Imperials were almost aggressive about it. To them he wasn’t invisible, he was beneath notice. It had taken him time to realize why, but he suspected it was Palpatine’s glorification of humanity. Perhaps to eyes blinded by his evil a cyborg like Lobot represented a horror. A droid or an alien could be disdained as simply inferior, but an obvious cyborg was a perversion of that human ideal. This was ironic for three reasons, and Lobot couldn’t help but feel dark smirk under his impassive impassivity.

The first reason was that the Empire used very similar implants to his, often on less than consenting subjects. He’d seen some of those poor souls, their brains overloaded and fried within a few years. The second irony was that he knew that cybernetics were in the future of many of the young women and men behind the stormtrooper helmets. Bacta could only heal so much. The third irony was that it let him get away with murder.

Mass murder, on this particular day.

It was a smallish listening post, only a few dozen technicians, troopers and officers. As masses went, this one was barely palpable under the Empire’s skin, but a good doctor knew every foreign mass must be excised. Lobot wasn’t a very good surgeon, and the two kilograms of stolen, high-grade plastic explosive around his waist would make a terrible scalpel, but when the surgery was complete the long-term prognosis got that much better.

The walls gleamed and his boots clicked on the polished floor. He could have been in any Imperial installation on any world in the galaxy. That’s what really frightened Lobot about the Empire: their need for homogeneity, for smoothing away all the variations and imperfections and rough edges that made the galaxy a place of life. Instead they want grey and chrome and polished plastisteel and everyone in lockstep. It might have been sad if it weren’t so frightening.

He reached the large, sealed blast doors at the north-west corner of the building. Two stormtroopers, one not too short and the other not too tall, stood watch and Lobot could feel the eyes behind the masks tracking him as he approached. Even now, though, he wasn’t really being seen. He was a uniform and a set of blinking lights without a face or a name. He typed the keycode into the door controls and had a nervous moment waiting for an alarm to sound. Then every stormtrooper in this facility would have a very great interest in seeing his face. But the code worked and the doors irised open with a hiss and the two troopers forgot his existence.

Behind the door was a lift that took him down beneath the earth and at the bottom was another with another set of stormtroopers and behind that door was the reactor. The plan was working. It was working because there were some very clever people among the Rebels, and some very stupid ones among the Empire. No, not stupid. The facility was hardened against attack, fortified and guarded. Any open assault or commando raid would have to pay such a price to take that it simply wasn’t worth it. But Lobot was not a commando and his cell wasn’t a military force. Even after Yavin, the Empire hadn’t adjust to the reality that they were facing a popular insurgency, not just a hostile military. The idea of a cyborg in djsguise simply walking in with explosives hidden under his shirt in sensor-baffling wrap was one that had never been accounted for. And in truth it shouldn’t be enough. The explosives Lobot carried might dent the reactor, make a mess, kill a few techs, but simply weren't enough to truly damage or destroy this facility.

Except that for the last six months, a member of the cell working at the local refinery had been altering the fuel mix they received. The impurities had begun to accrue inside the reactor. They would be cleaned out at the next routine maintenance round, but that wasn’t for another two months and in the meantime the reactor had a layer of volatile, unstable fuel by-products building up inside and waiting for a nudge. Two kilos of hi-ex were a hell of a nudge.

The other useful side effect was that the reactor had developed a wobble, an energy fluctuation that hampered the facility’s internal surveillance, a particularly bad wobble might look just like the interference from a localized jammer like the one Lobot had activated on entering the room. There were three techs on duty, two of them leaning over a console with their backs to him and the third watching a board of displays and outputs with a studiously bored expression. Lobot had a concealed four-shot blaster in the small of his back, just below the explosives. He shot the three techs with mechanical precision and set to work. The distorted surveillance could only go so long before someone decided to check in, so that was his first priority. He stepped up on a desk and slapped a small black box on the side of the security camera. The box contained a self-activating slicer program that would capture a small time segment from the camera’s local memory and send it to the main system instead of the real camera feed. An old trick, but a good one. Lobot had created the program himself, and he was 78.2% confident in the algorithm that identified a time segment to loop. Much lower odds than he would have preferred, but generous enough to gamble on.

Idly, in a separate thread, he wondered how Lando fared. They had parted ways during the chaos of the fall of Bespin and Lobot had heard precious little since. Lando, he knew, had a knack for landing on his feet.

The access panel Lobot wanted was right where their intel had said it would be. It popped off to reveal the dusty, insect-ridden underside of the generator’s main cooling coil. Everything was shiny and polished, expect where no one ever inspected. An apt metaphor, if an obvious one. He carefully unwrapped the explosives from around his waist and arranged them beneath the cooling cool. The timer he set for ten minutes, long enough to hopefully escape the blast radius but short enough to minimize the chances of detection. The tamper-resistant detonator should help for the latter but it would do so by making the former impossible. He replaced the panel, dragged the three bodies behind a console where they would be out of sight to cursory glance, double-checked the camera hijacker was working, and deactivated the jammer. All told, it had taken slightly over seventy seconds from time the door closed, which was a full three seconds longer than his optimistic simulations. Not mission-critical, but annoying.

The door slid open and Lobot stepped out. The two troopers didn’t even glance his way this time. From their stances - backs stiff, knees locked, chins slightly dipped – he calculated they were likely engaged in some other activity, perhaps playing a wargame over short-ranged comms. If so, they were less likely to check inside the reactor room.

He rode back up the lift, out the upper door and made his way towards the secondary exit. He had no valid reason to leave, not as the brain-fried cogitator he was pretending to be, but as Lando had been wont to say, improvisation is the soul of success. He had been referring to hustling a mark rather than engaging in asymmetrical warfare, but Lobot suspected the principle was the same.

He almost made it. The alarm went off with two minutes remaining on the timer and two guarded doors between Lobot and escape. It was an intruder alarm rather than an evacuation, so either they hadn’t discovered the bomb or they had and had already defused it. In the absence of other information, Lobot chose to believe the former. Not because it was necessarily more likely, but because it made him feel better. He would find out one way or another in about ninety seconds.

Two doors. Four troopers. One officer standing beside a big red button that would drop blast shields over the doors so tough they’d probably be the only thing left after the reactor blew. Assets: a holdout blaster with one shot remaining. And, of course, the fact that as a cyborg, a brain-auged cyborg at that, they didn’t really regard him as human. He drew in a deep breath, ignored the results of the simulation he’d run by reflex, and walked into the guard post.

Well, more stumbled than walked. He affected a dragging leg and a compulsive tic in his neck, the very picture of a malfunctioning cyborg – not that that’s how it actually worked, but that’s how they thought it worked. The troopers and the officer stared but stayed still, frozen by indecision. The officer let Lobot get within arm’s reach before stammering an order but it was too late. Lobot flashed into action. He grabbed the officer around the throat with one arm and shot the nearest trooper in the neck. The other three troopers brought their guns blasters to bear with well-drilled precision but they hesitated to fire for fear of hitting the hostage officer. Lobot backed up until his thighs bumped the console. The next part was tricky. He had to lower his gun to reach for the button that opened the outer door, which would give the troopers time to rush him.

He took another deep breath, calculated the angles, and acted.

He slammed the button. As soon as his gun went down, the troopers charged. He shoved the officer forward into one and they tangled into a heap. He’d lifted the officer’s blaster as he’d shoved and it came up firing. His first shot went through the thinner armour on a trooper’s belly, but he didn’t hit the second one squarely and his shots were mostly absorbed. The trooper tackled him and they went backwards over the console. Lobot landed badly and everything went blurry for a moment before the redundant systems in his implants took over. As always, he had a curious feeling of detachment, like he was observing himself as much as being.

The trooper landed across Lobot’s legs but her blaster went skidding away. They clawed at each for position until Lobot slammed an elbow into the trooper’s neck and was able to kick free.

There was an ominous red counter in the corner of his vision counting down from ten.

He ran.

Something in his knee didn’t feel right, but he ran. He almost made it clear.

The blast lifted the roof off the listening post on a pillar of green-licked fire, and the shockwave tossed him across the street like a litter in the wind. He had a brief vision of a building wall rising up towards him like a deep sea wave

He woke up sometime later. Pain licked along his side, and static fuzzed the edges of his vision. His left arm wasn’t working too well, and his stolen uniform jacket was shredded. His braced himself on the wall and pulled himself to his feet. Bystanders were gathering, some of them wounded by shrapnel and the blast wave. The Imperial post was a ruin, just a hollowed out space filled with fire and death. Part of

it had subsided down into cavity where the lower levels had been. Lobot thought of the two stormtroopers he’d passed that had been so absorbed in their game. So many young lives snuffed out before they could even properly learn why they had to water the tree of liberty with their blood. Perhaps, in time, they might have learned the truth of the Empire and become allies. Or maybe they were part of the teams that so enthusiastically rousted local nonhuman residents from their homes simply to harass them.

He started to limp away, trying to remain unseen by the still-growing ground, but then he looked up to see someone looking at him, a human woman who appeared concerned by his injuries, or perhaps simply by his existence. He waited for her to simply look away, or perhaps even to denounce him, but instead she placed a gentle hand on his elbow and asked him if he was alright. She turned to wave over a Talz with an emergency medic vest who was tending to a fallen person, but Lobot assured her he would be fine, that he was just walking home.

“Well, alright, “ she said solicitously, “You be safe now. You never know what other trouble is going to come up these days.”

Lobot smiled gently, and said, “Oh, I think it’s over for now.”

“I hope you’re right, I really do. Maybe now the Empire will stay gone and we can all go back to our lives.”

She squeezed his hand warmly and they parted. As he walked away, some burning portion of the base collapsed and it prompted a cheer and then that cheer continued and grew and then it became applause and cheering and Lobot let that cheering fill his ears and heart as he walked away.

**Author's Note:**

> Lobot's such an interesting character. I had to go look him up again before writing this, and learned that apparently he became active in the Rebellion after being forced to leave Cloud City slash abandoned by Lando. A lot of this story was inspired by Rebels and the character of Tseebo.


End file.
